The FBI surveilled black Muslim religious life as a national security risk

Evidence

RACON’s final report, the Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States (1943), reveals the way in which the FBI attempted to discipline religious conduct in the United States. The report creates a profile of pro-Japanese African American organizations that warned of Islam’s links to pro-Japanese sentiment. It then attempted to catalog all of the various Muslim groups popular among black Americans as a way of measuring the security risk to the US nation-state. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 393

Categorization

• XREF: The profiling of an entire religious community through one subversive element mirrors the earlier chapters’ treatment of how a single frame gets projected onto an entire Muslim group — the same logic at the state surveillance level. — connects to: The FBI conflated Black Muslim anti-racism with sedition and imperialism critique — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 234; The FBI surveilled black Muslims as seditious threats more than white Arab immigrants; The FBI surveilled the Moorish Science Temple for anti-imperialist and anti-racist activism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 243